Your First Edit

This topic will guide you through steps to make your first edit using the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap.

Prepare your environment

After installing the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap, open ArcMap. At first, it will appear that nothing has changed about your ArcMap environment. However, assuming the installation was successful, three items were installed:

A set of geoprocessing tools and models to download, extract, and upload vector data from and to the OpenStreetMap server.

Customizations to the core editor environment in ArcMap to handle the OpenStreetMap tags inside the core Esri software.

A conflict editor UI analogous to the reconcile UI for enterprise geodatabase.

It is recommended that you keep all the files you'll use for your edit session in a single directory. To prepare this directory, do the following:

Create a new directory on disk for your project. For example, e:\projects\OSMEditorSample

Create a new map document and save it in the folder created in the previous step.

Create a new file geodatabase, e.g., OSMDefaultStorage in the project folder. If desired, you can
designate it as your default geodatabase, although this is not required. If you do set it as your default geodatabase, remember to save the map document again after doing so. When you run the Download and Symbolize tool to download data from OSM, you will
download the data from OSM into a new feature dataset in this geodatabase.

The general workflow of using the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap consists of 4 basic steps. Each step is described in the sections below. See the
Tools topic for specifics about tools described in this workflow:

Download data from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap has limits on how much data you can download at once. Also, downloaded data for a large extent can take time. For your first edit, focus on a smaller area such as your neighborhood or hometown. Add a basemap or reference data so you can define
your current location in the ArcMap interface.

Once you have located your area of interest, zoom in to a level where you will easily be able to identify streets and buildings.

Expand the OpenStreetMap Toolbox in your newly created directory's data folder. Doubleclick on the
Download and Symbolize OSM Data model. This model allows you to download the data and prepare it for the editing environment in one step, using additional scripting models (e.g., Symbolize Points, Symbolize Lines, Symbolize Polygons, and Symbolize OSM
Data) to apply edit templates and group the layers according to the geometry type and map features. Enter the parameters for the model as specified below:

In the 'Extent of data download' input field, select 'Same as Display'.

In the 'Target Feature Dataset', browse to the location of your default geodatabase, and then append the name of the new feature dataset that will be created when the model is run.

In the 'OSM Group Layer', you can leave the default value or give the group layer a different name.

After entering the parameters, click OK. The model will begin to run. After it is completed, the downloaded OpenStreetMap data will be added as fully symbolized layers into the data frame.

Edit the data

In this step, you will edit the data downloaded from OpenStreetMap in your ArcGIS Desktop environment. New features can be added; feature attributes can be changed, and/or refined. You can use any tools you would normally use for editing in ArcMap to edit.
For tools specific to the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap, see the Editing Tools section in the
Tools topic. Important: Remember that if you derive OpenStreetMap edits from an existing data source, you are responsible for checking that licenses and property rights allow for the derivation and/or submission to OpenStreetMap. For example, if
you are using data downloaded from your county's online data server to digitize your house, you are responsible for checking the license for that county data.

You can stop editing at any time and then later on resume in another edit session. On each save for an edit session, the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap components track the edit changes and store the respective OSM action in a standalone table. This table
(typically named <name_of_featuredataset>_osm_revision) is used in the upload process to commit the changes back to the OpenStreetMap server.

Submit the edit changes to OpenStreetMap

After you have made an edit to the downloaded features, you can post the edit back to OpenStreetMap.

Doubleclick the Upload OSM Data model from the OpenStreetMap Toolbox, and enter the following information:

OpenStreetMap base upload URL: This should be automatically populated with the URL to OpenStreetMap

OSM Revision Table: you will need to browse to the <nameoffeaturedataset>osm_revision table in your geodatabase. Note, this does not always appear in the list of available files that show up in the dropdown for this field.

Comment describing the upload content: enter a comment that describes the change you made

OSM login credentials: Provide the user name and password of the OSM editing account. Note: if you do not already have an OpenStreetMap account, you will need to create one. See instructions in the
Assumptions section.

Click OK.

Your edits should be posted to the OpenStreetMap data within the hour, unless another user's edits in the OpenStreetMap community supersedes yours. In that case, you will need to resolve conflicts (see next section).

Resolve data conflicts

If during the upload process a conflict between the local data and the server data is detected, the geoprocessing dialog window will show the error description as a warning in green font color. If background processing is enabled, it is possible to check the
geoprocessing results window (see
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Using_the_Results_window/002100000013000000/) for detected conflicts. You can also open the revision table to manually inspect the current state of the local updates and/or the state of detected
conflicts, as shown below.

For reviewing and correcting the conflicts, use the Conflict Editor available through the OpenStreetMap toolbar, as shown below. To enable the Conflict Editor button, you need to be in an active and open edit session.

Once all the conflict corrections are made, you will upload the corrections to the server, again using the
Upload OSM Data tool. If, however, additional changes were applied to the server the conflict resolution can become an iterative process. See the see the
Editing Tools section in the
Tools topic for more about the Conflict Editor.
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